I'm hoping to have done with Bellow's great neurotic by the weekend, having now reached the final fifty pages, but for some reason I seem to be slowing down again despite the fact that Herzog's run in with the police is the only part of the novel to achieve anything close to narrative momentum.
The problem is that I've let myself read the thing too slowly, dwelling upon the 'fine' writing, instead of just diving in, immersing myself in the character's worldview just enough to enjoy the flavour of his world, and not sticking around too long.
I've just not read the novel well enough, somehow. A failure of my imagination.
3 comments:
I think there can be such a thing as 'too much' of a protagonist's worldview. I'm all for character development, but at some point, it seems to me that you can have too much of a character's development and too little of the world in which he develops; too much of his worldview and not enough view of his world. The dynamic between character and cosmos is always interesting; sometimes, writers fail (or maybe, readers fail) in their perceptions of that dynamic. It makes for a painful experience on at least one end.
That's spookily pertinent to my reading of the novel. The bits where we do get a view of the world are the bits that came to life for me. There's a section dealing with Moses as a child that evokes the world of 1920's New York so vividly you can taste the bootlegged liquor (and that's from a non-drinker.) I suppose that's why I feel unsettled by my judgement of the novel, that sense of not doing it justice.
What you say about reading it too slowly is spookily pertinent to some of my reading so far. The problem with attempting to savour a writer's style is that one can overdo this, and lose the general sense of the book; this results in a stilted, unsatisfying experience, where one remembers (fondly) a few brilliant moments but fails to appreciate the novel as a unified work. I think that happened with my reading of Ulysses the first time round (inevitably, I would say) and perhaps, more recently, Middlesex. I like placing the blame for this 'reading too slowly' lark on a busy life packed with things to do. But no fear! I hope you'll find strength to complete a good and satisfying reading of it one day.
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